What’s the Cost of Museum Exhibitions?

The artist Caitlin Masley at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y. Behind Ms. Masley, volunteers filled in her tracings inspired by images of Modernist architecture. Image via NYT.

The New York Times recently published an article chronicling the process of putting on a museum exhibition, as told by professionals from New York and Connecticut. The write-up covers everything from exhibition conception to painting the walls after shows come down. It also covers exhibition budgets:

Expenses for shows with valuable historical pieces lie in crating, shipping and insurance. For contemporary shows, costs veer toward artist commissions and installation requirements. Either way, all the curators and directors spoke of the pervasive reality of high exhibition budgets.

The [Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s] annual exhibition budget, excluding overhead and payroll, is about $300,000. At the Hudson River Museum, costs for a single exhibition have reached \ $150,000.

The Bruce’s annual operating budget is $5.1 million a year, Mr. Sutton said, of which 60 percent is allocated for exhibitions.

All of this means that fund-raising from foundations and private donors is crucial. Mr. Sutton said he needed to raise about $3 million a year. “I’m a perennial mendicant,” he said.

Also, in a recent interview with Glasstire, the Blaffer Art Museum’s outgoing director Claudia Schmuckli said that their current budgets can range anywhere between $50,000 and $100,000 for a show.

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4 days agoby glasstire#Repost@morgangrasham ・・・ Check out this article by @glasstire critiquing Clay + Things at @site131 (open until December 14). "The standouts of the show are the collaborative works of Eric and Morgan Grasham. Eric’s ceramic vessels are freestanding objects that are inserted into Morgan’s taxidermied animal hides. The vessels and daggers are functionally removable, though they discourage viewer handling with their grandiose flourishes and mason-stained brilliance. Morgan’s taxidermy is expressive in ways that showcase the majesty of form, and they’re terrifying objects of grace and power. The artists are experts in the language of their respective mediums, and are clear